In the past, vehicular equipment (for example, a navigation unit or multifunctional display) that fetches a specific application from outside through wireless communication, and uses the application to provide information has been developed (refer to non-patent literature 1).
However, in the existing vehicular equipment, a dedicated application that meets running requirements of the vehicular equipment has to be independently developed in order to fetch an application from outside and run the application. For example, versatile applications compatible with versatile platforms including the Android (registered trademark) and iOS (registered trademark) have been developed for the sake of personal digital assistants including a smartphone and tablet PC. The versatile applications cannot be fetched into the vehicular equipment and run as they are.
By the way, a device that installs a versatile platform, which is compatible with versatile applications developed for personal digital assistants, in onboard equipment can be conceived so that a personal digital assistant such as a smartphone or tablet PC can be used to implement a popular feature in the vehicular equipment. The device is confronted with a problem to be described below because vehicular native applications that are implemented in advance as embedded features of the vehicular equipment and versatile applications fetched from outside coexist and run together.
Specifically, there is a possibility that a versatile application may behave incompatibly with a native application because the versatile application is not designed and produced based on the specifications for vehicular equipment. For example, there is a possibility that an output screen image produced by a native application may not be displayed because an output screen image produced by a versatile application fetched from outside is displayed at a timing at which the output screen image produced by the native application should be displayed on a display.
In order to avoid the foregoing incident, coordination is needed for fear display and output to be performed by a native application and display and output to be performed by a versatile application fetched from outside may contend with each other. Due to the situation, as for an existing vehicular equipment, a versatile application to be fetched from outside has to be provided with an independent mechanism that takes account of the running requirements of the vehicular equipment into which the versatile application is fetched. However, lots of development resources are needed in order to independently develop a versatile application that meets the requirements of the vehicular equipment. This becomes a factor of impeding prevalence of an application that is superb in information freshness and versatility.